Are we looking for more maintainers?

[msathis]

I understand that maintainers have a lot to focus on, from daily life to work to open source. But at the same time, i feel this project has the potential to be the modern, performant alternative to mkDocs.

I can see a lot of PRs waiting for review, issues waiting for replies. Can we add additional maintainers to ease the burden of current maintainers?

Hope no one gets offended by this as it's not my intention. Thanks for the amazing project! ❤️.

[joshrotenberg]

I have bandwidth for, at the very least, helping out with issue triage and labelling, in addition to fixing bugs as they come in. Would love to offer more help.

[ehuss]

Of course more maintainers would be nice. Anyone is welcome to respond to issues or provide reviews for PRs or help with testing. I'll also update the contributing guide with a little more information.

If someone wants to look at some issues, here are some that are top of my mind:

• Rust edition 2021 support #1593 — Needs to be implemented soon.
• header.hbs renders above the top of the HTML document, out of view #1331 — Needs a web expert.
• Preprocessor output files are deleted when hbs renderer is called (from mdBook > 0.3.1) #1087 — There are some PRs for this, but it is a big design issue that will take some careful consideration.
• Buttons still overlap code #1322 — There have been several PRs for this, but all of them have had issues.
• Warn on unknown configuration settings #1595
• A surprising number of PRs and issues come in regarding setting up CI. There are about a hundred ways to set up CI, with different providers, different approaches, different deployment scenarios, different needs, etc. I'm not sure what to do here, since making the CI docs a hundred pages long probably wouldn't help, and trying to explain how to use the ins-and-outs of every provider is also out of scope. I'm uncertain why people are having such difficulties.
• Consider the design for extending the default theme in general. Several PRs roll in wanting to add this or that specific thing, but I'm wondering if there are better ways to add extension points. Some examples: Add a logo to the navigation bar of the HTML rendered book #1584, Add before_body_end handlebars partial #1531, support google analytics 4 property #1481, theme: Update google analytics #1290 (I would like to remove the analytics option, and just make it possible to embed javascript in the page), Include template #1271. There are also some regarding the menu bar I can't find right now (like adding additional icons to the top). I don't want to add too many extension points, since they can make it more difficult to change things later (like the {{> header}} issue linked above). However, adding dozens of little "add this little icon here" is also probably not a good approach. I'm unsure of what approach to take.

There's lots more, and I'm sure each individual has their own things they would like to see, which makes it difficult to prioritize and manage. Also, a lot of PRs are "drive-by" in nature, where someone drops a change they want, and then when it is merged, they don't come back to help when the PR results in issues. This makes maintenance even harder because it puts the burden of supporting more new things on me.

Let me know if you have any questions, or specific things you want to help with.

[djcarpe]

Pick @joshrotenberg, he won’t shut up about Rust and MDBook. Skilled and passionate. The two ingredients for real magic.

[ISSOtm]

Hi, I'm just a random user! :) But I'm still volunteering ^^

I actively use mdBook (two-fold), so I'd love to see it evolve and thrive. I'm already somewhat busy with other projects, so I could "only" help with issue triage & PR review, and likely not tackle the bug reports myself.

I believe that this would still be useful, as a significant PR backlog may be deterring to contributors (if only because of merge conflicts). My own PRs have not received any feedback, and my downstream projects would benefit from the changes; so while I understand the lack of maintainer time, it still feels discouraging.

I have previous maintainership experience on gbdev/rgbds and more of that org's projects, including an active technical documentation using mdBook.

Is there a channel (Zulip or anything) where one can discuss with maintainers? This would be useful to e.g. keep the above "important issues" list updated, receive some feedback more quickly, etc.

[simonmichael]

+1 for a mdbook chat room, even if it must be non-matrix.

[sanmai-NL]

Still looking for maintainers, or can this be closed?

[ehuss]

Yea, I think almost every rust-lang project is open to more maintainers. Anyone that wants to help with reviews or responding to issues would be very appreciated!

[ISSOtm]

I have been crawling through the bug tracker for a while, and I'm noticing that quite a few actually have mergeable PRs that have been sitting for a while. Are more maintainers needed? (I can volunteer.)

[Dylan-DPC]

@ISSOtm yeh both of us are currently more focussed with rust-lang/rust and other repos so I guess wouldn't mind having more people on the team. Given that this is a rust-lang repo, it's a bit more complicated in terms of ownership, so we'll have to discuss and see how that goes

[ISSOtm]

Alright. Do you want any means of private contact?

[Dylan-DPC]

We don't have a place to communicate at the moment so you can contact either me or ehuss on zulip. I'm available on discord servers as well

[ISSOtm]

Done so, though I don't know what your username on Zulip is.

[Dylan-DPC]

i'm @DPC on zulip